The Best Operating System for Dedicated Server Hosting
Once you have chosen on obtaining your business dedicated server, you need to decide on the server operating system which can depend on the availability, cost and employee expertise.
Unlike the desktop world Microsoft have overwhelming market share. There is a multiplicity of open source operating systems including Linux and FreeBSD. These are often bundled at no extra charge to the customer. Commercial operating systems such as Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or 2008, can be installed on the server if the dedicated server hoster has a Microsoft SPLA agreement.
Red Hat Enterprise is a commercial version of Linux or RHEL offered to hosting providers on a monthly fee basis. However you can use the a RHEL derivative known as Centos which has free updates. With Red Hat there is a subscription which provides for OS updates through the Red Hat Network using an application called up2date which is rpm based
Other operating systems are available from the open source community at no cost. These include CentOS, Fedora Core, Debian, and many other Linux distributions or BSD Unixsystems such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
Typical support for any of the operating systems above depends on the type of supervision offered with a particular dedicated server package. Operating system support may include updates to the core system in order to that the latest patches and security fixes are installed.
It is quite common on non-Microsoft Servers to be provided with a control panel to manage the server, especially if the server is required for web hosting. Cpanel which includes Web Host Manager (WHM) allows for the upgrade of the core operationg system as well as the routine admin tasks.
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For free OS’s they all work fairly well. However, the topic you posted is “The Best Operating System for Dedicated Server Hosting”. There is no debate here…its OpenVMS. With 4 levels of security and the fact its never been hacked either as DEC VMS or OpenVMS. Why do international banks and the NSA use it and not Linux, UNIX or MS? The problem here is that even today so few know about it and its rarely mentioned since you and 95% of IT people don’t know it or even its existence.
Its it free? NO. yet you did not state “The best free OS’s”.
To date, the U.S Department of Energy?s Computer Incident Advisory Capability (DOE-CIAC) lists a total of 22 VMS security advisories; of these, only 3 have been issued since November 1994. A search of CERT advisories with keywords VMS, VAX, or OpenVMS yielded a total of less than 25 unique advisories whereas Solaris yielded 266, Linux 313, and Windows 451 respectively.
OpenVMS offers 4 key levers of security:
1 Subjects Active entities, such as user processes, that gain access to information on behalf of people. Users and user processes.
2 Objects Passive repositories of information to be protected, such as directories, files, batch and printer queues, etc.
3 Authorization database Repository for the security attributes of subjects and objects. From these attributes, the type of access (if any) is authorized. This would include the system user authorization files (SYSUAF), a rights database (RIGHTSLIST.DAT) as well as various network authorization databases (such as NET$PROXY.DAT)
4 Audit trail Record of all security-relevant events, such as access attempts, successful or not. This would include logfiles, etc.
During a hacker convention….VMS box was game to 5000+ hackers whose objective was to hack the various boxes entered in the contest in order to score points. According to Opcom?s report of the events “The VMS machine on the Green team was configured with Apache web server. As we are aware, VMS is an extremely secure operating system. While many other boxes in the room, mostly Unix, Linux, and forms of windows, and even a Macintosh, were compromised and subsequently attended to by their masters, the VMS system remained intact”.
In other words..if stability and security is a key issue for your OS than there is no question on ones choice. Maybe its time to educate yourself and know there is another OS that beats the crap out of ALL!
DNG